Blood kinetics of ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulphate in heavy drinkers during alcohol detoxification

Studies of ethyl glucuronide (EtG) blood kinetics have so far been performed on healthy volunteers with ingestion of low to moderate doses of ethanol. These data are not necessarily transferable to heavy drinkers where the consumed doses of ethanol are much higher. The aim of this study was to investigate the pharmacokinetics of EtG and ethyl sulphate (EtS) in blood in heavy drinkers after termination of alcohol ingestion.Sixteen patients from an alcohol withdrawal clinic were included directly after admission. Time of end of drinking, estimated daily intake of ethanol (EDI) and medical history were recorded. Three to five blood samples over 20–43 h were collected from each patient subsequent to admission.The median EDI was 172 g (range 60–564). The first sample was collected median 2.5 h after end of drinking (range 0.5–23.5). Two patients had levels of EtG and EtS below LOQ in all samples, the first collected 19.25 and 23.5 h after cessation of drinking, respectively. Of the remaining 14 patients, one subject, suffering from both renal and hepatic disease, showed concentrations of EtG and EtS substantially higher than the rest of the material. This patient's initial value of EtG was 17.9 mg/L and of EtS 5.9 mg/L, with terminal elimination half lives of 11.9 h for EtG and 12.5 h for EtS. Among the remaining 13 patients, the initial median values were 0.7 g/L (range 0–3.7) for ethanol, 1.7 mg/L (range 0.1–5.9) for EtG and 0.9 mg/L (range 0.1–1.9) for EtS. Elimination occurred with a median half-life of 3.3 h for EtG (range 2.6–4.3) and 3.6 h for EtS (range 2.7–5.4).In conclusion, elimination of EtG in heavy drinkers did not significantly differ from healthy volunteers, and EtS appeared to have similar elimination rate. In the present work, there was one exception to this, and we propose that this could be explained by the patient's renal disease, which would delay excretion of these conjugated metabolites.